Theo Todman's Web Page - Paper Abstracts

While I certainly do not intend to discourage the drawing of inspiration from the works of Aristotle, when one's aim is to illuminate the practice and metaphysics of contemporary science such inspiration must surely be tempered by a passing acquaintance with the deliverances of, say, the last hundred years of scientific inquiry.

T. E. Wilkerson's paper, 'Natural Kinds1' (Philosophy 63 (1988) 29-42) falls regrettably short of this desideratum. Wilkerson makes a number of points about sortal2 terms, and proposes a number of distinctions between types of such terms. Much of this seems useful and unobjectionable.